CHICAGO (AP) — The chance to test out the latest video games and other electronics and get paid $75 to boot seemed too good to be true. It was.
CHICAGO (AP) — The chance to test out the latest video games and other electronics and get paid $75 to boot seemed too good to be true. It was. On Tuesday, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced that more than 50 fugitives being sought on arrest warrants — 15 of them for felony charges — were arrested when they showed up at a Chicago warehouse for what they thought was going to be a day of electronics fun. About 50 more were arrested after the fake electronics event. In a news release, Dart said members of his office sent 10,000 letters to the last known address of people who had warrants from Cook County for their arrest. While the vast majority came back undeliverable, the release says some people called the phone number on their letter. Not knowing they were talking to members of the department’s warrants unit and not employees at a marketing company, they made appointments to come to a county warehouse on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Then, between Sept. 17 and Sept. 24, they started showing up. Making sure everything appeared to be a harmless promotion, the sheriff’s department decorated the outside of the warehouse with signs and balloons. Not only that, but when the fugitives arrived, they saw people who appeared to be smiling warehouse workers heading off to cars carrying boxes with plasma televisions and video game systems who actually were undercover officers carrying empty boxes. The offenders hurried inside, where their identities were confirmed, and the undercover officers asked them to pose for pictures before they headed off for their electronics adventure. But, as they posed, the officers arrested them. The release said that one of the fugitives, a Chicago man with 32 arrests on his record, was so worried he would not be allowed into the warehouse because he was 90 minutes late that he "was breathlessly calling investigators as he took buses and sprinted the final blocks to make his appointment." Another man, who was wanted on a domestic battery charge, took a bus from Wisconsin to the warehouse. The so-called "Operation C.W. Marketing" is the latest effort to lure fugitives to capture them, following such operations as one in which fugitives were arrested after they showed up for holiday shopping certificates. Another group of fugitives was arrested when they showed up after being informed that they were owed federal stimulus money. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
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